The Wall Street and London City Masters of the Universe thought they were "Smarter than Gravity." They were not. Now it is economics for the rest of us.

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Wednesday, April 3, 2013

From Baby Credits to Carbon Credits: Climate Science and Economics

Leading voices in the climate debate, including President
Obama’s science czar, were advocates of baby credits to control global cooling before they advocated carbon
credits to control global warming.An examination of their past
views should be undertaken before more economic decisions are made. ﻿﻿﻿

A 1976 CIA report stated global cooling
was a major threat.

http://stevengoddard.files.wordpress.com

Their arguments have proven false in the past and they have advocated
other policies such as forced sterilization and baby swapping adoption services
based on gender. These policies were advanced in the name of science and the
environment, not for social engineering.

Consider John Holdren who is the Assistant to President
Obama for Science and Technology, the Director of the White House Office of
Science and Technology Policy, and a Co-Chair of the President’s Council of
Advisers on Science and Technology.He
is an advocate of increased spending to fend off an impending climate crisis.But his views are untrustworthy when you
examine his past.In order, he has
argued that increased amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere causes:

1. Global cooling and
crop failures,

2.Global warming,
and finally

3.Climate change.

Mr Holdren’s past views and his ‘scientific’ studies have
proven flawed. What would our current society like if Mr Holden had been
able to turn his ‘science’ into policy?

In 1968, Paul Ehrlich, a colleague of John Holdren and his future
co-author, published The Population Bomb.
This book stated that the Earth had
reached its maximum population and mass starvation would occur in the 1970s and
1980s.This Malthusian view proved
completely wrong, but it views are worth noting.The main conclusion was:

The battle to feed all
of humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will
starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late
date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate.

The message of fear was obvious.

One advocate of this new anti-population movement was John
Holdren.He also supported the “global
cooling effect” which believed carbon emissions would cause temperature drops
and crop reductions.

In 1978, it gets interesting. John Holdren and Paul Ehrlich published a book
titled Eco-Science: Population, Resources, Environment.

In this book, Mr Holdren and Mr Ehrlich advanced their
beliefs on global cooling. They stated action was needed in response to science. Among the policies they
identified to reduce global cooling and control population growth were:

1.The creation of a “baby
credits” trading scheme where individuals could trade their reproductive rights
for cash with other individuals.Couples
with no babies could sell their ‘baby rights’ to other couples who wanted to
have more babies than the state determined level. This baby credit trading
scheme is an eerie predecessor to the carbon trading scheme now in place.

2.Putting a birth
control chemical in the world’s drinking water or food supplies to reduce
fertility levels to rates they would determine were acceptable and implant
young women/girls with birth control capsules when they hit the age of puberty
. Later, the capsules could be withdrawn when the woman
decided she wanted to have children (withing state proscribed limits.)

3.Create financial
lotteries with cash prizes that would only be open to childless people;

4.Create an adoption
system so potential parents who wanted a male child instead of a female could adopt
what they wanted rather than “trying for another child.”Unsuitable single mothers would also have to
give up their children for adoption.

Both Mr Holdren and Mr Ehrlich believed that by the 1980s,
global cooling would have a devastating impact and that the population would be
demanding action.Imagine what might
have happened if those governments had acted on global cooling. Now, of course,
we are told that schemes should address either global warming and/or
climate change.

History is soon forgotten and policy makers tend to live in
a time bubble where the past was last year and the future is the next election.
But what lessons could be drawn from these events, given that the people
involved in the past are now in positions of significant policy and spending influence?

a. Before undertaking any spending programs or policies such
as more carbon credit trading schemes, reviews should be made of what these
individuals and their colleagues have advocated in the past.

b. With respect to an individual spending project such as
vehicle emissions, multiple sources of data should be reviewed to determine if ideological
views have found their way into the discourse.

In the 1970s and 1980s, many mainstream scientists were
making morally demands about how the rest of us should reshape our lives to
meet their scientific views.Now, in
2013, we are facing new demands for more radical polices from the same voices,
albeit based on the exact opposite of what they believed earlier (cooling vs
warming).

Those scientists who made these past projections about
global cooling and mass starvation are frequently the same people who now
occupy significant positions of influence. John Holdren is one of those
people.Before letting their voices gain
any further influence, a review of their own views might be useful.

About Me

Hi there! We here at the Honest Banker do not have PhDs in Economics like Ben Bernanke over at the US Federal Reserve. Nor do we have Harvard degrees like Governor Mark Carney of the Bank of Canada/Bank of England. We are not quants with math degrees. What we do have is practical education and honest experience. We contribute to the real world economy while trying to figure out how to survive and build value in our lives and our communities under the current economic model. This model has been dictated to us by economists and politicians using many of the same seriously failed economic models that gave us the financial collapse of 2007 and 2008.
This is “economics for the rest of us” who live in the real world and are trying to figure out how to survive in it despite what the financial sector is doing to us.